For hundreds of thousands of eager job hunters out there, one of the quickest way to get their resumes out to perspective employers is using the online job site from Monster Worldwide (NASDAQ: MNST), Monster.com.

It all seems easy enough; just post your resume and wait for the job offers to roll in. Well, it has been discovered that hackers have cracked into the site's database in order to garner personal information that could help them tailor targeted "phishing emails" to the site's users.

"Phishing" is a long running problem for unsuspecting internet users, where users get e-mails -- seemingly from respected companies -- that convince them to log into various sites and turn over personal information. The most lucrative phishing programs come to users from sites pretending to be bank institutions, or large internet sites such as eBay.com. These try to get the users to log onto the sites and update passwords, or something similar.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) has had a good time recently nipping at the heels of what many consider its largest enemy -- Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT). While I'm not agreeing that Microsoft is in Google's direct cross-hairs more than other companies, the area of customer security and privacy is one area where both companies have taken potshots at one another recently. Google has taken criticism for the immense privacy breaches it apparently is making available to the world, while Microsoft's Windows operating system and other software constantly have security issues, from malware to spyware.

Google recently posted an entry to its security blog that lists the most common web servers that are used to host malware, which then gets distributed to consumer PCs -- turning them into "zombies" for illegal online activity. Yes, you guessed it -- Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) was listed along with the Apache web server (which runs the free Linux operating system) as responsible for distributing 49% of all malware on the internet. You probably know malware -- it's what is responsible for those annoying popups on many millions of PCs, and it generally slows down a PC significantly or crashes it altogether.

Now, to be fair, Google did list the open-source Apache web server as responsible for hosting and distributing malware on the internet as well, so I don't think this was a direct attack on Microsoft, but more as a statement of fact.

But, Google did take its analysis further and determined that Microsoft's server software was actually responsible for distributing malware twice as much as the Apache web server software. While this will not come as a surprise to many IT professionals, it seems that Google could have a motive of undermining trust in Microsoft's products by using published research and analysis showing weakness. Well, it's free to do that, and perhaps Microsoft could turn the tables on Google and point out weakness in the company's software -- except that Google does not make software for web servers.

Sometimes, the use of Google's many products have unintended and good side effects. Case in point: Google's search engine alone is being used to identify and track the activity of malicious websites. You know, the websites that attempt (and often succeed) in dropping viruses and malware onto the computers of unsuspecting web surfers?

Online security vendor WebSense has been using Google's capability to actually search through and index the binary executable programs (.EXE for you Microsoft OS vets out there) to identify strings of binary data that actually harmful and destructive computer code. These pieces of code and actual programs sit in the background of many websites waiting for any and all visitors to show up -- and then they usually and silently install something on the visitor's computer that is, well, not a good thing.

On the flip side, some smart hackers (there are plenty of those) could manipulate they way they drop malware onto web surfers' PCs by including search terms in their executable programs and also by trying to work around the Google capability of having their programs indexed and identified as malicious. Just like prolific email spammers, hackers will always try to find a workaround to ensure their criminal activity can continue unabated. It seems Google can create the most helpful search systems in the world at the same time making it possible for computer criminals to propagate their nastiness on an unprecedented scale.